A high performance ultra-wideband low cost SMA-to-GCPW transition

This letter presents a novel low cost through-the-wall SMA connector and the transition structures from the SMA to a grounded coplanar waveguide (GCPW). The SMA connector has two short metal legs extended from the outer conductor used to reduce the discontinuity of the transition. The parameters of the GCPW are designed to match the geometry of the coaxial. A matching stub is introduced in the center conductor line to further improve the performance of the transition. A prototype device is developed and measured. The measurement results show the return loss of the proposed transition is better than 20dB up to 26.5GHz

Over-the-Air Testing for Connecting Faults Diagnosis in Beamforming Antenna Arrays with Short Measurement Distance

A novel diagnosis method for detecting the connecting faults (i.e., disconnected and misconnected antenna elements) in beamforming antenna array is proposed. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, the proposed diagnosis method can be conducted when the phased array operates in its default beam-steering mode. Moreover, the proposed diagnosis method is fast since it only requires a few near-field measurement positions in a very short distance (i.e., the near-field of the array). Measurement uncertainties, e.g., the scatterings from the practical testing environment, are considered in the method. Therefore, the proposed method can robustly detect beamforming array connecting faults in practical production line testing environments. The method is first validated using an 11-element dual-polarized base station (BS) antenna array at 2.7 GHz by numerical simulations. It is further experimentally validated using an eight-element single-polarized patch antenna array at 3.6 GHz. The same antenna array also serves as the probe array with only a 10-cm distance between the antenna under test (AUT) and the probe array. The diagnosis results for different types of connecting faults with numerical simulations and measurement validations have verified the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method in practical applications.</p